Free The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

interviewing the Eastwoods printed a story that "financial difficulties and health problems" had beset the family during the preceding twelve months. Eddie told of hopes being dashed that his work would permit him to take the family to some other part of England. He was now resigned to staying there in Narborough.
    "Kath can never look in the direction of The Black Pad when we're driving by," he said.
    Kath's mother, the sixty-four-year-old grandmother of Lynda Mann, told reporters that she visited her granddaughter's grave once every fortnight to replenish the flowers. She said, "As a Christian I do feel sorry for anyone who has done this. It may have been something that got out of hand. But I feel bitter too. It has crippled us. He must be brought to justice."
    Kath said publicly that even former friends tended to avoid her and the family. She didn't blame them and understood their reasons.
    "They just don't know what to say to you," Kath explained. "They feel that they must say something and they don't know what."
    But she longed for her old companions to return.
    Just after the first anniversary of the death of Lynda Mann, a hospital worker from Carlton Hayes Hospital found a tiny cross with a poppy attached to it, there in the ground beside The Black Pad, on the spot where Lynda had been murdered. Nobody knew what to make of it. The Eastwoods thought it might be a sick joke. Others thought it might be a gesture of remorse on the part of the killer. Poppy Day in England fell two weeks before the anniversary of the murder so the police thought it was just a simple gesture by some child, but who could say?

    Chapter 10.
    Breakthrough
    One of the first experiments Alec Jeffreys conducted using genetic fingerprinting was on a family group to see if the pattern of inheritance was as simple as he expected it to be. From that test he saw clearly that half the bands and stripes on the X-ray film were from the mother, and the rest from the natural father. The patterns were inherited in a sensible fashion. It was thrilling.
    Determining constancy from tissue to tissue within the individual followed next. His team took both blood and semen and found that the genetic map was constant irrespective of the kind of cells from which the material had come. To discover how sensitive the system was, they tested small quantities of blood and semen. It was rather sensitive: a drop of blood was enough, or a tiny amount of semen.
    But there was the question of whether DNA was stable enough to survive in degraded forensic material. Jeffreys had conversations with forensic scientists at the Home Office who had access to three-year-old blood and semen stains. They tested these and it worked again.
    Then they began testing the system on a wide range of animals and fish. Again it worked, and as they improved and refined their system the resolution and clarity of the X ray got even better. It only remained for the excited geneticist to write up his discovery for publication in the scientifi c p ress. He did the writing, but held up publication until he had his patents; there were highly profitable implications to his discovery.
    Jeffreys didn't speak publicly about genetic fingerprinting until November, 1984, one year after the death of Lynda Mann. He discussed it then at two meetings in London: one with the Lister Institute of Genetic Medicine, and the other with the Mammalian Biochemical Genetics Workshop. These satisfied the scientific disclosure requirement for his patent application, an application that listed Jeffreys as the inventor and the patent rights as vested in the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, of which he was a research fellow. Alec Jeffreys wanted any commercialization to benefit a British company, so Lister selected Imperial Chemical Industries as the sole licensee for any and all commercial exploitation.
    In March 1985, when the Leicester geneticist published, he estimated the chances of two people having the same DNA